MAY 26 • 2022 | 55
envisaged by the Torah is that in it every
individual mattered. Justice was to be
paramount. The rich could not buy
special treatment and the poor were not
left destitute. When it came to communal
celebrations, everyone — especially the
orphan, the widow, the stranger — was to
be included.
Everyone had at least some share in
the harvest of grain and fruit. Employers
were to treat employees with fairness
and sensitivity. Even though there were
still slaves, one day in seven they would
enjoy the same freedom as their owners.
This meant that everyone had a stake in
society. Therefore, they would defend it
with their lives. The Israelites were not
an army conscripted by a ruler for the
purpose of his own self-aggrandizement.
That is why they were capable of
defeating armies and nations many times
their size.
Above all, they were to have a sense
of destiny and destination. That is the
meaning of the keyword that runs like a
refrain through the curses: keri, a word
that appears seven times in our parshah
and nowhere else in Tanach. “If you walk
with Me with keri … then I will walk
with you with keri.”
There are many interpretations of
this word. Targum Onkelos reads it as
“hard-heartedly,” Saadia as “rebelliously,”
Rashi as “treating as a casual concern.”
Others understood it as “harshly” or
“with hostility.” Maimonides, however
(partially echoed by Rashi, Rashbam, Ibn
Ezra, Chizkuni and others), understands
it as related to the word mikreh, meaning
“chance.” Hence the meaning of the
passage according to Maimonides is: “If
you believe that what happens to you
is simply a matter of chance, then, says
God, I will leave you to chance.”
CHOOSING PURPOSE
On this reading, the book of Vayikra
ends as it began, with the fateful choice
between mikra (with an aleph) and mikreh
(with a heh): between seeing life as a
call, a summons, a vocation, a destiny,
and seeing it an accident, a random
happening with no ultimate meaning
whatsoever.
So it is in the life of nations and
individuals. If you see what happens
to you as mere chance, your fate will
be governed by mere chance. That is
what the Sages meant when they said,
“Wherever [the Torah] says, ‘
And it came
to pass’
, it is always a prelude to tragedy.”
If you simply let things come to pass,
you will find yourself exposed to the
vagaries of fortune and the whims of
others. But if you believe you are here
for a purpose, your life will take on
the directedness of that purpose. Your
energies will be focused. A sense of
mission will give you strength. You will
do remarkable things.
That was the special insight Jews
brought to the world. They did not
believe — as people did in ancient times
and as atheists do today — that the
universe is governed by mere chance. Was
it mere chance that a random fluctuation
in the quantum field produced the
Big Bang that brought the universe
into being? Or that the universe just
happened to be regulated by precisely
the six mathematical constants necessary
for it to give rise to stars and planets
and the chemical elements essential
for the emergence of life? Was it mere
chance that life did in fact emerge from
inanimate matter? Or that among the
hundred million life forms that have
existed on Earth, just one, Homo sapiens,
was capable of asking the question “Why?”
There is nothing self-contradictory
about such a view. It is compatible with
all the science we now know, perhaps
with all the science we will ever know.
That is the universe as keri. Many people
think this way. They always did. On this
view, there is no “Why,” not for nations,
and not for individuals. Life just happens.
We are here by accident.
Jews believed otherwise. No one said
it better than the Catholic historian Paul
Johnson:
“No people has ever insisted more
firmly than the Jews that history has
a purpose and humanity a destiny. At
a very early stage in their collective
existence, they believed they had detected
a Divine scheme for the human race, of
which their own society was to be a pilot.
They worked out their role in immense
detail. They clung to it with heroic
persistence in the face of savage suffering.
“Many of them believe it still. Others
transmuted it into Promethean endeavors
to raise our condition by purely human
means. The Jewish vision became the
prototype for many similar grand designs
for humanity, both Divine and man-
made. The Jews therefore stand right at
the center of the perennial attempt to give
human life the dignity of a purpose.”
The people who change the world are
those who believe that life has a purpose,
a direction, a destiny. They know where
they want to go and what they want
to achieve. In the case of Judaism, that
purpose is clear: to show what it is to
create a small clearing in the desert of
humanity where freedom and order
coexist, where justice prevails, the weak
are cared for and those in need are given
help, where we have the humility to
attribute our successes to God and our
failures to ourselves, where we cherish
life as the gift of God and do all we can
to make it holy. In other words: precisely
the opposite of the violence and brutality
that is today being perpetrated by some
religious extremists in the name of God.
To achieve this, though, we have to
have a sense of collective purpose. That
is the choice that Moses, speaking in the
name of God, set before the Israelites.
Mikra or mikreh? Does life just happen?
Or is it a call from God to create
moments of moral and spiritual beauty
that redeem our humanity from the
ruthless pursuit of power?
“To give human life the dignity of a
purpose.” That is what Jews are called on
to show the world.
The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks served as the
chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of
the Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings have
been made available to all at rabbisacks.org. This
essay was written in 2015.